Student Blog
Google news and updates especially for students
Enroll now for Mechanics I on Course Builder
September 28, 2012
In case you missed last week’s
announcement
about the online learning open source project called
Course Builder
, we’re here to extend an invite for you to join an upcoming course delivered on the platform so you can see it in action. You can
enroll now
(for free) for
The Saylor Foundation
’s upcoming
Mechanics I course
.
This full college course built by experienced professors allows you to work at your own pace or connect with other students in the course forums and will stay open and online.
Mechanics I
is built from the best that the open web has to offer: MIT lectures, readings from the University of Nebraska, and Saylor-built assessments to tie it all together.
Not only is the course cost-free, but open educational resources (OER) make up the majority of the content. These are available to everyone to freely use, share and edit whether you are an instructor, student or self-learner. Putting these resources together using Course Builder as the platform helps to better connect students with free, open, convenient, and enjoyable self-paced learning.
Even if engineering is unfamiliar territory, now’s your chance to experiment and learn - with nothing to lose! The Course Builder open source project provides you with the opportunity to try something new and Saylor will be adding additional courses to the platform often. So whether you’re in school or a lifelong learner, there’s no better time - or way - to dive into the open web.
Posted by Susie Vaks DePianto, Sr. Program Manager
Announcing the 2013 Google Scholarships Programs for Europe, Middle East and Africa
September 26, 2012
Today we are excited to announce that applications are now being accepted for two scholarships in 2013.
Google Europe & Israel Scholarship for Students with Disabilities
is now open to students who will be enrolled in study for the 2013/2014 academic year at a university in Europe or Israel. Students must be enrolled in a computer science, computer engineering, informatics or closely related technical program. Students with a disability, mental health or other long term health condition are eligible to apply.
Google Anita Borg Memorial Scholarship: Europe, Middle East and Africa
is now open to current female students who will be enrolled in study for the 2013/2014 academic year at a university in Europe, Middle East or Africa. Students must be enrolled in a computer science, computer engineering, informatics or closely related technical program and maintain a record of strong academic performance.
The deadline for both of the scholarships is 1st February 2013 and the announcement will be made in May 2013. Scholarship recipients will receive a EUR 7,000 scholarship and Scholars and Finalists will be invited to attend a networking retreat in June which will be held at a Google office in Europe. Take a look at the following videos to get a better feeling about the program:
Finally, these scholarships are just two of the opportunities we offer to students in order to encourage them to excel in technology and become active role models and leaders in the field.
For more information about other Google programs and scholarships, please visit this
website
.
We look forward to receiving
your application
!
Posted by Efrat Aghassy, scholarship program manager, Europe, Middle East and Africa.
Google Code-in Contest for High School Students Starts this November
September 24, 2012
Today marks the launch of the third
Google Code-in
, an international contest introducing 13-17 year old pre-university students to the world of open source software development. The goal of the contest is to give students the opportunity to explore the many types of projects and tasks involved in open source software development. Globally, open source software development is becoming a major factor in all industries from governments, healthcare, and relief efforts to gaming and large tech companies.
When you hear the term “open source” do you ask yourself:
What exactly is open source?
How can I get involved in open source software development if I’m just starting to learn how to code?
What types of work do open source projects do?
I’d like to work on open source but I’m not really a coder, what else can I do?
I’ve never worked on a global project using IRC and chat groups: can someone help me?
If you’ve wondered about any of these questions and are a pre-university student (age 13-17) then you should join in on the fun with the Google Code-in contest starting
November 26, 2012
.
From late November to mid January, students will be able to work with 10 open source projects on a variety of tasks. These projects have all successfully served as mentoring organizations working with university students in our
Google Summer of Code
program.
The types of tasks students will be working on will fall into the following categories:
Code: Tasks related to writing or refactoring code
Documentation/Training: Tasks related to creating/editing documents and helping others learn more
Outreach/research: Tasks related to community management, outreach/marketing, or studying problems and recommending solutions
Quality Assurance: Tasks related to testing and ensuring code is of high quality
User Interface: Tasks related to user experience research or user interface design and interaction
Over the last two years we have had 904 students compete in the contest from 65 countries. This past January we announced the
10 Grand Prize Winners
for the 2011 Google Code-in. In June, we flew the winners and a parent/legal guardian to Google’s Mountain View, CA headquarters for a
5 day/4 night trip
complete with an awards ceremony, talks with Google engineers, Google campus tour, and a full day of fun in San Francisco.
Visit the
Frequently Asked Questions
page on the
Google Code-in site
for more details on how to sign up and participate. Please help us spread the word to your friends around the globe. If you are a teacher that would like to encourage your students to participate, please send an email to our team at ospoteam@gmail.com. We would be happy to answer any questions you may have.
Stay tuned to the
contest site
and subscribe to our
mailing list
for more updates on the contest. We will announce the 10 open source organizations that will be participating in the contest on November 12. The Google Code-in contest starts on
November 26, 2012
, and we look forward to welcoming hundreds of students from around the world into the open source family.
By Stephanie Taylor, Open Source Programs
Zurich’s Engineering Interns get a newsworthy lesson in physics
September 24, 2012
This year we tried something new with our engineering interns in the Zurich office - a field trip exchange between
CERN
and Google interns. Back in July, interns from Google Zurich went on a highly anticipated field trip to CERN. To say it was an exciting day at CERN would be an understatement, as the
discovery of a new boson
(possibly the Higgs) had been announced that very morning.
The cake prepared for the visiting CERN students, decorated with
a reference to a certain cult computer game.
Michael Gornisiewicz, a full-time software engineer at Google summed up his day with the interns.
When we arrived we were given an introductory presentation about the various accelerators at the complex, including the Large Hadron Collider and its two main experiments ATLAS and CMS. A quick tour of the main control centre followed, filled with an inordinate number of displays.
In the afternoon, the group was split into three subgroups, each taking turns to get a tour of the Antiproton Decelerator (AD), the Computer Center and attend a talk by Sverre Jarp about the software and computing facilities used by CERN. The AD is a laboratory where antimatter (chiefly antiprotons) is investigated and devices to store it are developed.
The computer center contains a number of historical devices, including one of the NeXT machines that Tim Berners-Lee developed the World Wide Web. We were also able to view CERNs own data center.
For the last part of the day, we visited “the Globe” - CERNs visitor center. Following this we were then taken through the ATLAS visitor center by a passionate physicist who explained the fine details of the workings of the detector. We were also shown a short video about how the detector was built, which included some difficult work to lower the massive detector through the relatively narrow opening to the cavern.
Overall, it was a very interesting trip, giving a glimpse into the world of cutting edge particle physics, an appreciation for how large data processing problems can be solved on a limited budget as well as a visit to where the web begun. All on possibly the most historical day in particle physics in recent history - when 50 years of particle physics research culminated in the discovery of a new boson.
Following Google’s exciting field trip to CERN, we had a chance to return the favor. In August CERN interns visited Google Zurich. The day was packed as we hosted informative talks about infrastructure at Google, how to design Gmail for scale and incremental web indexing percolator to name but a few. We also had a panel discussion with former CERN engineers, who are now Googlers. This session proved to be very insightful for our guests. The CERN interns were also enthusiastic about our office tour - and we finished the day with some cold drinks and networking.
Thanks to everybody who helped out with this exchange - it helps us to deliver the best intern experience for interns from CERN and Google.
Posted by Frida Borjesson, College Recruiter - Europe, Middle East and Africa
My Summer @ Google: A unique challenge opens the doors for one Tokyo intern
September 19, 2012
Introduction: Today we're featuring Yamato Kaneko, an intern from our Tokyo office who was given a unique task at the beginning of his internship. Read on to discover what he learned through the process.
The team I've been working on this summer is the Google Technical Services (gTech) team. I was specifically in charge of managing and supporting Google Shopping partners (e-commerce businesses) and Google Books partners (authors and publishers). While I’ve learned a lot from the projects with Shopping and Books team, today I’d like to share my awesome lunch-time-side-project at Google Japan.
When I showed up for my first week, I needed to set up objectives and key results, which we call OKRs, for my internship. Besides the participation in ongoing projects of Google products, my mentor and I added one more OKR: Set up one-on-one meetings with 20 Googlers in 8 weeks and get to know what they do at Google and what they have done before Google.
First, I started talking to Googlers in my team. Although I’ve met them at regular team meetings, we didn’t really have a chance to talk. The one-on-one meetings worked out really well as an icebreaker, and the communication went much more smoothly after the chat.
As I got to know Googlers around my desk, I started reaching out to Googlers in different teams, including Business Development, Marketing, Partner Solutions, Product Management, Software Engineering and so on. Each of these functions manages different products from Search, Maps, Books, Shopping, Ads, to YouTube. Asking hundreds of questions to various teams, I got to know how this company works with different functions and people with various skills and experiences.
It was amazing to see how diverse career paths they have taken before coming to Google. I met a Strategic Partner Development Manager who joined Google Books team from the publishing industry, and a Product Manager who was a consultant at McKinsey. One Googler was a photographer traveling around the battlefields in the Middle East. Another Googler studied films and media in college and joined YouTube to work with creators.
Another thing impressed me was that none of Googlers I contacted declined my meeting requests. Here at Google, there is a term called “Googleyness.” Googley people are creative, passionate about their work, and communicate openly. They are willing to roll up their sleeves to help others and get things done. Everyone of the 22 Googlers I’ve met was truly Googley and helped me to exceed the expectations of this project.
I think the success of this project is also partly because of the Google cafeteria, which allows me to make a meeting into a lunch. Without this great perk that encourages interactions between Googlers, it may not have been possible to set up as many meetings as I have. Coffee breaks at micro-kitchens and events like TGIF were also very helpful to make a casual chat with Googlers I met for the first time. Larry and Sergey must have known what was needed for effective communication, and that’s why they invested in the food facilities.
I spent my summer interacting and learning from more Googlers than I ever imagined. I think I'm ready for the next stage in my career where I can start building my own unique story.
Posted by Yamato Kaneko, Intern, Google Japan
A new class of Google Student Ambassadors hits campus
September 18, 2012
To kick-off the new school year, last month we invited 150 bright and enthusiastic students from universities across the US to join us in Mountain View for our annual two-day Student Ambassador Summit.
At the Summit, our new class of Student Ambassadors learned all about Google’s culture and products ranging from Apps for Education and Google+ to Map Maker and Google Play. Equipped with this knowledge, these students headed back to their respective campuses, ready to share what they’ve learned with their peers, professors, and communities.
When we first launched the Ambassador Program in 2008, our goal was to empower the next generation and equip them with the tools they need to teach others around them how to leverage technology to do things better together. Whether it’s getting their local communities on Google Maps, creating a Google+ page for their college football team, developing a custom Chrome theme for their University, or teaching campus groups how to get organized with Google Apps, these students have awesome ideas and are putting them into action everyday.
And this year we took the program global. In the past twelve months we’ve launched in 65 countries and we hope to continue this expansion. If you’re interested in learning more about this program, please visit the
Google for Students site
and make sure to keep your eyes peeled for the Ambassador on your campus (who will be easy to spot with their one-of-a-kind Gmail messenger bag).
Posted by Miriam Schneider, Student Ambassador Program Global Lead
My Summer @ Google: Building more than just apps at Android Camp
September 17, 2012
Introduction: Over the summer we host a variety of
programs
and internships for
technical
and
non-technical
students. We’re relaunching the
My Summer @ Google
series to give you an inside look at each of these programs, hearing from the students themselves who participated. Today John Yang-Sammataro, a current computer science student at Stanford University, recaps Google’s
Android Camp
. Android Camp is a week long interactive program where students work in teams to build Android applications.
When I heard that I had the unique opportunity to have hands on training with the team that builds Android, I jumped at the chance. Nearly everyday for the past two years, I have walked past Larry Page and Sergey Brin's original Google server, which sits in the Huang Engineering Building at Stanford. However, this summer was the first time I visited the Google headquarters that the two famous internet entrepreneurs founded after their time at Stanford. I began the camp aiming to learn as much as I could about Google’s latest cutting edge mobile technology, but came away with a richer experience than I ever expected.
Each day we familiarized ourselves with the Android ecosystem through a whirlwind of workshops and activities. These were paired with daily team breakout sessions during which we applied our new skills to build apps. The Android team is really passionate about what they do. It is quite something else to ask a question about a software platform you are working on and receive a response from someone who can speak in the first person about why they developed the software that way! At the end of the week we presented our apps to a panel of Google engineers for critiques and feedback. I have never learned so much in my life within seven days!
With so much software development, it is hard to believe that we had time to do all the additional activities that the Android Camp team put together. Each day included a unique activity outside of the classroom lessons. We cooked pizzas, sampled delicious food at a different Google cafeteria every night, and even toured San Francisco finishing the evening at a Giants baseball game. Touring Google’s campus, we marveled at beach volleyball during break hours, the company’s fleet of shuttles and bikes, and even a free medical clinic. The genuinely energetic and motivated environment at Google's HQ reminded me that Google company culture is as much a colossal achievement in human resources as its products are technical marvel.
What impressed me most was that the Googlers and fellow campers I met were some of the most interesting and genuine people I have befriended. Each and every person had their own unique story and passion behind what they did. Even after twelve hours of coding and activities each day we would come back to our hotel and delve into conversation, not just about computer science but everything from politics to physics to startups to hometowns and underwater sea cables.
After a week of Android Camp I now have a technical familiarity and high level understanding of not only the Android ecosystem, but the wide array of open source software and public Google APIs that might take me months to learn otherwise. Now I am planning to build the main Android app for the company I am interning with this fall and our Android Camp team, Object Oriented, is working to launch our app on Google Play in a couple months. However, what I will keep for years to come are the memories of late night conversations woven about life,
Dalvik
, and underwater sea cables and the friendships with the people who started them.
Thank you to the Android Camp team and my fellow campers. You made Android camp an unforgettable experience.
Interested in Android Camp? Check back
here
in early 2013 for next summer’s application.
Posted by John Yang-Sammataro, Android Camper
Apply today for Google's Engineering Practicum Internship Program
September 14, 2012
Introduction: Over the summer we host a variety of
programs
and internships for
technical
and
non-technical
students. We’re relaunching the
My Summer @ Google
series to give you an inside look at each of these programs, hearing from the students themselves who participated. Today Jeanette Miranda, a current computer engineering student at Brown University, recaps Google’s
Engineering Practicum
internship program. Engineering Practicum is a summer internship for rising juniors that provides skills-based training, mentoring and professional development. Applications for Engineering Practicum are available
here
and the deadline to apply is October 15, 2012.
Being a technical intern at Google is truly a unique experience. For the summer, you are an engineer at Google. You are responsible for your project, and expected to complete it at a caliber appropriate for Google. You are going to learn, learn, and just when you thought you had begun to master something -- learn some more. It is an incredible, challenging, and engaging experience.
For me, being in Engineering Practicum was just as challenging, and even more incredible and engaging. I had first heard about Engineering Practicum through an email my school’s computer science department sent out with opportunities in industry. On a whim, I decided to apply - why not? It was early in the year and it was a chance to work at Google. Little did I know what an amazing program I had stumbled upon.
The Engineering Practicum internship is a 12-week program specifically designed to support the development of young computer scientists and to encourage diversity within the field of computer science. You are still a technical intern - but with the added support of being in a pod of two to three interns, a great series of lectures to address the difference between coding for a university class and for production, and social events for a close-knit, smaller group of interns who are also rising juniors.
This past summer, Engineering Practicum brought nearly 100 rising juniors to four different offices around the country for a summer of coding, learning and fun. The projects covered topics from Google+ to Maps to backend tools for developers and more. My project for the summer was developing and implementing an algorithm to turn video footage into motion thumbnails. Imagine taking a video of a pitcher throwing a baseball, and creating a single image with the pitcher captured at multiple stages of throwing the baseball. Over the course of the summer I worked on developing this algorithm, and testing it on a variety of different footage. In the last week, I wrapped up the project by giving a presentation to my team.
But for me, Engineering Practicum was about more than just my project - it was about having the experience of Google's engineers accessible to you as an undergraduate who had only completed two years of college-level computer science. This was shown in everything from the pod structure with two hosts for the summer, to having a mentor, to weekly lectures by engineers on everything from designing services meant to run around the globe, to testing production code. It was also a great opportunity to meet students from universities all around the country who not only pursue the same course of study as you, but also share your interests.
Together, all of this created an amazing summer experience. From getting to know my hosts, podmate and mentor, to submitting code to the code base, to figuring out how to tackle challenging technical problems on my own, to spending time with other interns - I felt I was exposed to the different sides of working at Google. I'm returning to school a more experienced programmer and a more independent learner, eager to study the many new areas within computer science and engineering that I have discovered.
Interested in Engineering Practicum?
Apply today!
Applications are due by October 15, 2012.
Posted by Jeanette Miranda, Engineering Practicum intern
Interns Making an Impact: Tim Blakely
September 13, 2012
Introduction: Our interns explore new ideas, accelerate the launch of new product features, and are big contributors to Google. Technical interns are embedded in every major engineering team where their impact is unconstrained by titles. They truly “do cool things that matter” and we’re sharing their stories with you now. Today we're featuring Tim Blakely, a PhD student at the University of Washington and a current Software Engineering Intern in our Seattle office. Interested in a technical internship at Google? Apply online at
google.com/students/intern
What are you working on? What is your internship project?
I am the lead developer on BigBrain, a large-scale computational neuroscience tool built on the cloud. The project began as an exploratory venture between Google and the
Allen Institute for Brain Science
(AIBS) to investigate whether the cloud could provide a platform for doing massively parallel, large-scale neural simulations.
Over the first four months of my internship, the project progressed to the point where a collaborative design document is being drafted in anticipation of a long term, collaborative relationship between Google and Allen.
The project is now going to be open-sourced—as per the request of the AIBS—which poses an interesting design problem: The program was originally started as an internal project that leveraged many internal Google technologies that are not currently public. Moving to full-open-source required that many of these technologies be changed or re-implemented. I worked on that transition, which we completed in July.
How would you explain your job to your best friend who is not a computer science major?
To say Google has tons and tons of computing power is the understatement of the century. Google recently launched an initiative to expose a lot of this computing power to the public in the form of the
Google Compute Engine
, which allows anyone to run programs in the Google cloud. It’s this available computing power that caught the attention of the AIBS. Because their next phase deals heavily with computational neuroscience, they have to decide what to do with their technology budget: do they buy a special-purpose supercomputer to fit their computing requirements, or can they instead leverage Google’s huge computing resources to meet their goals? And this is where I fit in. The goal of my internship is to answer the question, if the AIBS were to design a neural simulator that runs in the Google cloud, how would this be accomplished and what interesting and unique scientific questions could this answer?
Instead of taking the conventional (and lengthy) approach to biology research, which involves engineering proteins, cells and animal models directly in a lab, we looked at how we might implement the model in a computer simulation and simulate how the protein would affect a virtual brain. In this case, “changing the amount of protein expressed in the system” is simply a matter of changing a single parameter in a file and running the simulation again—a significantly cheaper and more efficient way of running experiments. And because the cloud is a big place, we’re designing our simulator so that the scientists at the AIBS can run tens, hundreds, or even thousands of these virtual brains at the same time. Doing the same thing in a physical biological model would be impractical, if not impossible!
In what ways have you been able to innovate at Google? What makes working at Google unique for you?
The project is interesting in that it’s a “vertical” project. That simply means taking many of the available Google technologies and applying them to a specific problem area. It’s a very unique position to be in; the scientific community at large has huge problems that require massive computational power, but very few have made the transition from private small-scale clusters to the cloud. By working closely with the AIBS, we are demonstrating how the cloud is a viable and valuable platform for scientific computing and hopefully beginning to shed some light on how valuable Google’s computational power is to the scientific and engineering community. On the flip side, it also is an important project from inside Google’s as well; with all the products and platforms available to the public, how can Google make its tools work together more fluidly and be more accessible to the huge market of scientific and engineering research and development?
What do you like most about your job? Are there personal rewards from the work you do?
My team (Big Science) has a really great dynamic and has the important role of building engineering and business relationships with the scientific community. I love science and the process of discovery, but at heart I’m an engineer and really love solving the practical problems that scientists run into. This job allows me to do both! And the fact that the project is open source is hugely important to me, in that I both get to give back to the scientific community and hopefully contribute something to the field of computational neuroscience community as well. It also doesn’t hurt to be able to tell friends and family of the awesome work I’m doing :)
Overall, how do you feel about your time here at Google, and what do you see yourself doing next?
To be honest? Working at Google full-time! Google’s tackling the cloud in a huge way, and going forward it’s important to build the relationship between Google and the engineering and scientific communities at large. I would love to be a part of that effort!
What advice do you have for students who are interested in an internship at Google?
Do it! Don’t be afraid of stepping out of your comfort zone. If you’re a C coder and get on a project that mainly uses python or Java, don’t get discouraged. Think of it as an opportunity to learn some new skills that will make you a better software engineer. Also, keep in mind that there’s more to being an engineer at Google than just hacking code. The opportunity to discuss, influence and change the direction of a product and contribute to its success can’t be emphasized enough. There’s really a unique and fun culture here, which is definitely something to embrace.
Posted by Jacqueline Pan, University and Intern Programs Specialist
Power Searching with Google is back
September 11, 2012
Cross posted from the
Inside Search blog
If you missed Power Searching with Google
a few months ago
or were unable to complete the course the first time around, now’s your chance to
sign up again
for our free online course that aims to empower our users with the tools and knowledge to find what they’re looking for more quickly and easily.
The community-based course features six 50-minute classes along with interactive activities and the opportunity to hear from search experts and Googlers about how search works. Beginning September 24, you can take the classes over a two-week period, share what you learn with other students in a community forum, and complete the course assessments to earn a certificate of completion.
During the course’s first run in July, people told us how they not only liked learning about new features and more efficient ways to use Google, but they also enjoyed sharing tips and learning from one another through the forums and Hangouts. Ninety-six percent of people who completed the course also said they liked the format and would be interested in taking similar courses, so we plan to offer a suite of upcoming courses in the coming months, including Advanced Power Searching.
Stay tuned for further announcements on those upcoming courses, and don’t forget to
register now for
Power Searching with Google
. You’ll learn about things like how to search by color, image, and time and how to solve harder trivia questions like our
A Google a Day
questions. We’ll see you when we start up in two weeks!
Posted by Dan Russell, Uber Tech Lead, Search Quality & User Happiness
My Summer @ Google: Freshmen Engineering Practicum
September 10, 2012
Introduction: Over the summer we host a variety of programs and internships for
technical
and
non-technical
students. We’re relaunching the
My Summer @ Google
series to give you an inside look at each of these programs, hearing from the students themselves who participated. Today Dhruv Maheshwari, a rising sophomore studying computer science and business at the University of Pennsylvania, recaps Google’s
Freshmen Engineering Practicum
internship program. Freshmen Engineering Practicum is summer internship for rising sophomores that provides skills-based training, mentoring and professional development.
Self-driving cars. Bright yellow bikes. Organic pomegranate yogurt. Floor-to-ceiling whiteboards covered in complicated algorithms and/or memes. Happy people. These are a few of the things I saw everyday at Google’s Mountain View campus. As an intern, I was immersed in a community in which each member was eager to share their passion about his or her work and company. For ten weeks, I was able to take part in activities that are all common at Google- brainstorming cutting-edge technologies, discussing industry trends, and philosophizing about various parts of life. Being part of the Freshmen Engineering Practicum program at Google allowed me to experience the most action-packed, productive, enlightening ten weeks of my life.
The Freshmen Engineering Practicum program (or FEP) is an internship for rising sophomores eager to learn about the Google work environment. When I first applied to the program online, I was simply looking for a way to get better at coding; little did I know, what came in the package was an experience of a lifetime. Apart from working on a real software engineering project, I attended weekly classes on various professional topics and and met with a mentor who helped me navigate my way through Google and gave me insightful advice for college. The best part was getting to hang out with what became my FEP family - the other interns, who were some the most quirky, driven, enthusiastic people I’ve ever met. The majority of the freshmen lived together in corporate housing, so each day we would ride the shuttle to work, split up into pods of three or four to our various teams - Ads, Google Earth, Mobile, etc. - and then meet up back in the apartment after work. Having such a diverse group of interns provided for an awesome learning experience; my roommate was an international student from Hong Kong who was happy to share his extensive knowledge of web design with me. We also had the opportunity to march with the Google float in the San Francisco Gay Pride Parade, dance on a cruise ship in the middle of the San Francisco Bay, and attend the world premiere of the Pixar in Symphony concert!
In addition to all the adventure, the actual coding projects gave us valuable insight into the world of software engineering. Each pod was assigned to a specific team at Google, and had two to three hosts who would guide us through our projects. We started the internship working through Google’s codelabs - tutorials that taught us about many technologies used at Google. After a couple weeks of that, we began our projects working solo or in groups of two or three. As a member of the Dynamic Display Ads team, I worked with a fellow intern to build an external API, which would allow advertising agencies to customize their dynamic ads programmatically (rather than through the existing user interface online). I began the internship with only two semesters worth of programming experience, but by the end, I had a sense of how Google’s entire codebase is managed, how to implement multiple servers in Java, and how to collaborate on a coding project with many moving parts. I was incredibly grateful to have a host such as ours, who was very open to asking us questions and teaching us much more than what was explicitly required for the project. After successfully completing the project, I gained much more confidence in my programming ability, and I’m excited to apply what I learned for my own projects in the years to come.
What impressed me most about this internship was being able to see the unique culture at Google. Despite their brilliance, it seems like each Googler is looking to learn from the other; no one is the “smartest” here. Even as an intern with many, many naive questions, I was treated as someone getting up to speed, rather than as an intern who has to prove himself. This environment only encouraged me to get passed the hurdles of being a Noogler and began contributing as soon as possible. Throughout the entire internship, I was so excited to come to work; I know it will be hard to recreate this experience again!
Interested in Freshmen Engineering Practicum? Apply
here
beginning January 8, 2013 and ending February 1, 2013
Posted by Dhruv Maheshwari, Freshmen Engineering Practicum Intern
Summer 2013 Software Engineering Internships at Google - apply today!
September 5, 2012
tl;dr
Apply today for our
Summer 2013 Software Engineering Internship
!
Summer is one of our favorite times of the year since hundreds of technical interns join us in our offices around North America. This year over 300 schools were represented in our technical intern program and with over 1,000 technical interns, there was never a dull moment. They fuel our innovative ecosystem and their energy is truly contagious! Our interns explore new ideas, accelerate the launch of new product features, and are big contributors to Google. Technical interns are embedded in every major engineering team where their impact is unconstrained by titles. They have the freedom to attend tech talks by Peter Norvig, take classes on technologies such as AppEngine and MapReduce, or unwind with a game of ping pong.
One of the things we hear the most is how much interns love the impact they can have while at Google; oftentimes a single line of code from their project can affect millions of users around the world. As one intern told us “It’s extremely rewarding to point out a feature on the live product and say (as modestly as possible), ‘Yeah, I did that.’” To give you an inside look into some of the projects our interns have recently worked on, we’ll be launching an “Interns Making an Impact” blog series over the next few weeks. We’ll also be hosting a Hangout On Air from the
Google Students page
on Google+, where you can hear from the interns and hosts firsthand about what the technical internship program at Google is like.
If you want to do cool things that matter,
apply here
for our Summer 2013 Software Engineering Internship. This role is available in our offices throughout North America. We’ll be posting other technical internship roles at
google.com/students/intern
in the next month or so, including User Experience, Hardware, and other opportunities -- so stay tuned!
Posted by Jacqueline Pan, University and Intern Programs Specialist
Congratulations to our 2012 Google Online Marketing Challenge Social Impact Award Winners
September 4, 2012
We’re pleased to announce the winners of the 2012
Google Online Marketing Challenge Social Impact Award
, an award that recognizes
Google Online Marketing Challenge
student teams that made an outstanding difference to their nonprofit partners via superb online marketing campaigns. Teams were judged on their impact on and relevance to their nonprofit partner, the success of their advertising campaign, and their overall report presentation. Reports were judged by an
independent panel
of nonprofit leaders.
Prizes for the winners include:
1st place
- $15,000 donation to the nonprofit partner
2nd place
- $10,000 donation to the nonprofit partner
3rd place
- $5,000 donation to the nonprofit partner
Congratulations to the following winners!
1st Place
1st place is awarded to
Alex Zhitnitsky, Oshri Rozenheck and Boris Fridman
, who were taught by
Professor Sarit Moldovan
and worked on behalf of nonprofit partner
Perach
. Perach is a nonprofit organization based in Israel that matches children from underprivileged backgrounds with student mentors. Through the GOMC Social Impact Award, the team created an online marketing campaign to find and recruit mentors to join the program for the 2012-2013 academic year.
2nd Place
2nd place goes to
Ginger Greey, Barbie Bird, Scott MacDonald and Beth Saunders
, who were taught by
Professor Lyle Wetsch
and worked on behalf of nonprofit partner
AIESEC Memorial
. AIESEC is a youth leadership organization that aims to create global youth leaders by facilitating international student exchanges and internships in over 110 countries. The team’s campaign was designed to increase overall brand awareness by driving traffic to the AIESEC Memorial site for relevant keyword terms.
3rd Place
3rd place is awarded to
Rahul Anand, Shruti Dhandhania, Arpit Bramhachari and Avinash Kumar
, who were taught by
Professor Abhijit Mustafi
and worked on behalf of nonprofit partner Teach for India. Teach for India promotes educational equity in India by creating lifelong educational leaders through its two-year teaching fellowship. The GOMC team aimed to increase brand awareness and fellowship applications through its online marketing campaign.
Congratulations to the 2012 GOMC Social Impact Award Winners and their nonprofit partner organizations working to make a difference around the world!
If you’re interested in being involved in next year’s Google Online Marketing Challenge Social Impact Award, stay tuned to
our website
.
These organizations were funded through the Google Inc. Charitable Giving Fund at the
Tides Foundation
.
Leslie Hernandez Dinneen, Product Marketing Manager, Google for Nonprofits
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